Posts Tagged ‘testing’

node.js is simply too cool to ignore. I find the trick to learning any new cool framework is to find a new cool project to write, and use the framework to write it in. httpmock is my cool new project.

I tend to work in large’ish programs of work with lots of teams. One recurring pain point in such an environment is dealing with other teams. Sure, your code is fine, but what happens if you have to integrate with their code? These days, that tends to be through web services, and it’s never pretty. Your team writes integration tests, verify they work, and commit the changes. Three days later, for no apparent reason, your build goes red. It turns out that other team broke their code again.

httpmock is a network server stubbing tool. I say “network,” primarily because I’ve got my dreaming hat on. At the moment, it’s an HTTP stubbing tool, but I’d like to add other protocols, especially SMTP. httpmock exposes a RESTful API that lets you spin up HTTP servers that you can control, and that helpully record how they were used so you can make useful test assertions. In other words, httmock expects you to execute your code full-stack, including making a full TCP handshakes across the network. httpmock just lets you control both hands involved in the handshake, and it does so in a way transparent to your code; you just have to point your configuration to the stub servers httpmock creates. I find this quite useful for functional testing.

Don’t get me wrong. Integration tests are important, and you should still have a set of tests that exercise the actual system, but expect some fragility in those tests. If they break, it doesn’t necessarily mean you broke them. Therefore, they should be in a separate build, one that may not have the same “stop the line” implications when it goes red. httpmock should not be used only for builds that are entirely in control of your team..

When I say that httpmock exposes a RESTful API, I mean it’s a truly RESTful API. There’s only one published URL, and hypermedia drives the interaction from there. This makes it easy to evolve the server while maintaining a stable client-side API. At the moment, I have only a Java binding, but I have intentions for more (and I’d love some help on the issue!). The idea of the language bindings is to present to the developer a friendly API that approximates normal unit-testing mocking frameworks without having to write your tests in a language different from your production stack.

The code above shows the Java assertions. The first line actually makes two network calls; one to talk to the well-known httpmock URL (in this case, http://localhost:3000) to get the hypermedia. The second one tells httpmock to set up a new server for stubbing purposes, which is then spun down on the last call in the method. For performance reasons, you may want to do some of these administrative tasks once for the test suite, particularly retrieving the initial hypermedia. The wasCalled method also talks to httpmock to perform the verification. The SystemUnderTest should expect to base its web service calls to http://localhost:3001.

Like typical stubbing libraries, httpmock allows you to set up stubs that will be executed if the server receives the expected call.

Installing

You need node.js to run the server. You can download httpmock from the incredibly ugly downloads page. Untar the server, and run bin/httpmock start.

This will run the control server on port 3000. You can optionally pass a --port command line argument to change the port and a --pidfile argument to use a non-default pidfile (useful if you’re running multiple instances). If you run the server in a background job, bin/httpmock stop will kill it.

If you’re using npm, you can install httpmock with sudo npm install -g httpmock. Installing it globally allows you to simply say httpmock start on the command line, which feels quite sexy.

The client bindings will simply be a library. For Java, add httpmock.jar to your classpath.

Roadmap

The following are the features I’d like to add to httpmock:

Support for multiple protocols, at least for verification if stubbing doesn’t make sense (SMTP, FTP, perhaps even things like printer protocols). It appears at the moment easy enough to support a plugin mechanism where the same REST API will work for multiple protocols, but I won’t know for sure until getting around to a second protocol.

Support for HTML. Right now, there is a JSON-based content type used for all communication, which is great for progammatic manipulation. I think it would also be quite nice to allow QA’s to manually set up stubs and perform verifications through a web browser.

A more robust stubbing mechanism. It’d be nice, for example, to only conditionally execute stubs if a specific request header was set.